Biography
A board member of the African Leadership Center, Alice Urusaro Karekezi is completing a doctoral degree in peace and development studies at Göteborg University in Sweden. She is researching gacaca, an indigenous mechanism reintroduced after the genocide for transitional justice, drawing on her experience as a gender monitor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and on her work with women who survived sexual violence. She encouraged the ICTR to take women’s experiences into account, addressing the UN General Assembly in March 1999. Ms. Karekezi co-founded the National University-based Center for Conflict Management in 1999, where she headed the justice, human rights, and governance program, working on issues related to reconciliation. She also held consultations with Rwandan and international women on the role of women in peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction.
“I was revolted that so many women—two out of three—were used as a sexual battlefield during the genocide,” says Ms. Karekezi. To bring the problem of gender-based violence to national attention, Ms. Karekezi introduced the country’s first annual 16 Days of Activism, working with stakeholders at all levels on a problem that she came to see as both a legal violation and an intimate one. She has been a lecturer at the National University’s Faculty of Law since 1996, and she is a board member of Imbuto, the Rwandan First Lady’s initiative for young and talented women. She has served on the advisory board of Justice Africa, a project of the Open Society Institute. Ms. Karekezi holds a diploma of specialized studies in law from the University of Aix-Marseille III in France and a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (01.2010)